


Tourist

by syrupwit



Category: DC Extended Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-08-14 16:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20195551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: There's something off about the new intern at S.T.A.R. Labs. Cyborg investigates.





	Tourist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlsarewolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlsarewolves/gifts).

> The version of Victor Stone who appears in this story is somewhere between the Cyborgs of _Justice League_ and the _Doom Patrol_ TV series.

It’s been an extra-long, extra-hard Memorial Day weekend, full of weirdness, crime, and weird crime. The concluding incident is a literal but low-key alien invasion, a seemingly endless procession of lumbering, mindless homunculi who snuck into this dimension through a leaky wormhole. Victor has been looking forward to a few days spent kicking back at home, repairing his flight jets and maybe getting some upgrades. When the homunculus situation finally wraps up, he heads to S.T.A.R. Labs to see his dad.

Victor’s dad has been doing much better with the workaholic stuff lately, but the lab is still the best place to find him at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. Victor slips in through the back entrance, stopping to chat briefly with Howard the janitor, and keys in through the security door.

The lights are on. He hears voices deeper in the lab. That’s odd; his dad rarely socializes at work, and hardly ever with colleagues on this floor. Someone laughs. Victor’s cyber-senses go on high alert.

“Dad?” he calls, preparing himself for the worst. Howard had seemed normal, there were no signs of struggle in the hallway, and the laboratory equipment appears to be intact—but this is his life, so all of that means next to nothing.

“In here, Victor,” says Silas Stone from the adjoining room. The person with him says, “Oh!” in this high, delighted voice, sounding too young to be anywhere near the lab and far too pleased about meeting Victor. What is going on?

* * *

As first impressions go, the new intern, Shuri doesn’t make a great one. Victor’s dad has barely finished introducing them before she’s right in Victor’s face, openly gawking at his left eye and inspecting his hand as she shakes it. Her bright smile and easy rapport with his dad can’t make up for the self-conscious shame that floods Victor, or the resentment that follows when neither she nor his dad notice he’s gone quiet and withdrawn.

Shuri is an exchange student, capping off her semester at a U.S. technological institute with a summer gig before she travels back to some country he’s never heard of. This is her first visit to Detroit. Victor doesn’t really care, but it’s news to his dad, who suggests that they grab a late dinner at a local all-night diner that Victor knows he considers an essential feature of the city.

Shuri is all too quick to agree, oohing and aahing in her unplaceable accent and inquiring about the menu with a cheerful, precisely targeted intensity that, if it mirrors her approach to scientific work, explains why his dad already likes her. It’s not fair. Victor’s been gone since Thursday. His dad should be paying attention to Victor, not some snotty college sophomore genius with strands of iridescent neon in her braids. Can Shuri fire energy beams from her hands? Can she cause and remedy power outages over a city block in each direction? Can she hack into the Pentagon? Probably not.

“You coming with?” says Victor’s dad, interrupting his sulk.

Victor realizes they’re both looking at him expectantly. “Uh, nah. I’m pretty tired. Think I’d better recharge.” Shuri perks up like she wants to ask about that, so he clarifies. “Not literally. I’m going to sleep.”

“Are you okay?” The concern on his dad’s face satisfies something hurt and petty in Victor. “I’m sorry, I didn’t even ask. We lost track of time here and I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s fine, Dad.” Victor manages a smile. “I’ll see you at home.”

“Nice to meet you!” Shuri yells after him, and he makes a gesture with his hand that might be considered a wave. He’s not out of the lab before he hears her start talking again.

He looks her up on the way home. Surprisingly, there's very little about her online. Shuri seems like the kind of girl who'd have a 100k-follower account on some popular social media site, but she doesn't even have a LinkedUp profile. Weird. By the time he gets to bed, though, he's too exhausted to keep thinking about it.

* * *

Thus begins the Summer of Shuri. She is everywhere. Victor can’t visit S.T.A.R. Labs without tripping over her color-coordinated shoelaces. He’s busier than usual with superhero stuff—turns out the leaky wormhole wasn’t a one-time thing—but he still sees a whole lot more of her than he’d like to. Every meeting, presentation, and corporate working lunch he attends, she’s there, asking odd questions and snickering to herself as she takes notes on her tablet in the corner. She even shows up at one of Cyborg’s mission debriefings.

The worst part of spending time around Shuri is that Victor starts to like her. She’s smart, obviously; she’s funny, even if her humor can be opaque; and she seems to genuinely like his dad, which is a lot rarer than it should be. Also, someone must have had a word with her after their first meeting, because she is 90% less blatant about staring at Victor’s metal parts. She gets comfortable being silly around him, starts including him in private jokes, and engages in good-natured teasing about his clothing choices, dour resting face, and habit of lurking in the shadows.

He should probably expect it when he starts finding it hard to look away from her smile, or when the sound of her laughter makes his pulse spike and his remaining muscles tense in a way that has nothing to do with social awkwardness.

It’s ridiculous. Victor used to go out with tons of girls. Well, three. Ish. Well, tons of girls had crushes on him. That was in high school and early college, sure, but he should really have more chill. He’s met Wonder Woman! He shouldn’t be losing it over some intern, even if she is really pretty and displays engineering competence beyond her years and has nearly made him cry laughing on a growing number of occasions. All right, maybe it’s not ridiculous.

What would be ridiculous is expecting anything to come of it. And he doesn’t. First, there’s no indication that Shuri is interested in him like that; she flirts, but she’s the kind of person who flirts with everyone, and the times he feels her watching him are best chalked up to scientific curiosity on her part. Second, he left this kind of thing behind when he became Cyborg. If he feels a twinge of sadness at the thought of what might have been… well, that’s all it is.

* * *

The dimensional hiccups increase exponentially in frequency, to the point where Victor is fielding calls every other day. He helps the Flash disperse a sentient thunderstorm, fights medieval-themed zombies with a group of quippy teenagers, and joins the Doom Patrol on consecutive emergency missions until they threaten to make him an honorary member. (Cliff proposes the secondary alias “Robotman 2,” and is immediately shut down.)

The incidents are disconnected on the surface—notwithstanding the rain of frogs that plagued Cincinnati around the same time a giant toad trampled rural Wisconsin—but oddly consistent in other ways. They tend to occur during the same four-hour window and within a steadily narrowing mile radius. It’s almost as if someone were experimenting. But who, and for what purpose?

* * *

Shuri works late so many days in a row that Silas resorts to begging her to take an evening off. Victor arrives in time to catch the tail end of this conversation and exchange greetings, and doesn’t learn until she’s well out the door that she’s walking home alone.

He doesn’t like that. The area has seen a sharp uptick in muggings lately. He has no doubt that Shuri can handle herself in most situations, but she usually takes the bus, and it’s a time of night she’s not familiar with. He gets her address from the company database and runs out to follow her.

He catches up with her quickly. Shuri is hard to miss, even in the darkness. It’s a peaceful evening with the promise of rain around midnight. The sky is overcast, the clouds tinged orange and gray with light pollution. A few streetlamps cast dim reflections on the asphalt. Victor takes a deep breath, lungs analyzing the air’s composition. Police scanners stream in the corners of his vision.

He keeps a safe distance behind her, and her stride doesn’t noticeably hasten, so it’s a surprise when she whirls around and aims a weapon at his face.

* * *

It turns out that Shuri can fire energy beams from her hands. She just uses gauntlets to do it.

“What tech is this?” says Victor, examining the gauntlets. The design is unique, the material unfamiliar. Snarling panther faces guard the barrel end. 

“Oh, I made those. They’re old, it’s a little embarrassing.” Shuri is shaky or giddy with lingering adrenaline. When they had both calmed down enough, she insisted that he come back to her apartment, since he went to the trouble of stalking her and he’s never seen it. Now she putters around her tiny kitchen, making tea. 

“They seem pretty cool to me.” Victor traces a panther’s upper canines. “What kind of metal is this? I’ve never encountered it before.” His nanites are humming with interest.

He feels her hesitate before she answers, “Vibranium. It is common in my country.” She busies herself with spooning honey into mugs, shoulders tense. The kind of tea she likes is a handmade blend of three different varieties, and the proportions seem to change every time.

“Huh.” He looks away from the panther’s gold eyes. “What was your country’s name again?”

The teakettle whistles. Their gazes meet, and something in Shuri’s face crumples.

* * *

Shuri isn’t just from another continent. She’s from another universe.

Also, the whole ongoing wormhole thing is maybe kind of her fault.

* * *

Against expectation, Victor’s dad isn’t too ruffled. He’s less concerned with how Shuri faked an internship for access to a scientific facility than the fact that she actually did the work.

* * *

“You should have come to us first, Silas,” says the Chief. 

“Niles, if I’d had any clue—”

Victor’s attention is on Shuri, poking around Doom Manor’s library shelves. She keeps making these faces, like she can’t decide whether things are amazingly bizarre or just disturbing. He’s glad for the anchor. Something about this place has always unsettled him, at the same time as it’s called to him in a strange way. Maybe he’s just uncomfortable with labs that have carpet.

“Young lady,” Niles Caulder addresses Shuri. She jumps and turns around, dropping a book.

“Old man.” The words are barely out before Shuri looks like she wants to clap her hand over her mouth. Victor stifles a smirk; he knows Jane, for one, says far, far worse on a daily basis.

The Chief’s eyes twinkle. “Fair enough. I’m almost certain that we can return you to your home, but the process may be a little… rocky. There’s no guarantee that our two universes will be the only ones connected. We will be vulnerable to a breach.” 

“I’m just happy if I don’t have to fight a giant toad again,” Victor jokes.

“We must remain open to every possibility,” says the Chief, but he’s smiling.

* * *

The team assembles on the lawn outside the Manor that evening right as the sun is setting. Shuri has her gauntlets and a backpack with her possessions. Victor has a figurative lump in his throat. The Doom Patrol have new uniforms, and they don’t look half bad, honestly. Except Cliff. Cliff always looks bad.

“Robotman 2!” 

“I told you not to call me that, man.”

The portal opens without a hitch. They’re staring into a stretch of grassy meadowland, framed by mountains in the distance. Shuri muffles a shriek into her fist. But then the scene changes, and they’re looking into a room instead. A lab, but it’s like no lab Victor has ever seen. An elegant woman with a shaved head and a pretty gnarly spear wanders into view.

“General?” Shuri’s tone is disbelieving.

“Princess!” (_Princess?_) 

The ensuing reunion ends up involving several busloads' worth of people. Shuri, when she hugs Victor and his dad goodbye, is crying a little.

* * *

The next week, which also happens to be the week before Labor Day, things go back to normal at S.T.A.R. Labs. The place seems quiet and still without Shuri there. Victor tries to help his dad with some of the work she left unfinished, but he's unfamiliar with some of the concepts. He takes a walk to clear his head and purge his frustration.

His instant messenger pings. The sender is unfamiliar. Victor pulls up the message in his wrist display, frowning.

It's from Shuri. Somehow, in the past week, she's managed to invent an interdimensional Internet connection.

Mood immediately lighter, Victor starts his reply.


End file.
